Pragmatic Kanban a book concept

Did you or your team ever experience the following sensations?

“I’d like to work in a more agile or flexible way, but Scrum isn’t a good fit”
“We have a lot of work and have a hard time prioritizing”
“Our team spends a lot of time managing conflicting priorities of multiple stakeholders”
“We have too much work to do”
“Our work is too dynamic to be planned in sprints”
“We can’t finish a product/service end-to-end in our team. We are just part of a larger organization”
“We struggle to deliver predictably”
“Most of our work is to make sure we liaise with external suppliers”

If so, that’s great because we are writing a book exactly for you. Via this post Pragmatic kanban a book concept we like to give you the first preview of it. Please do provide us with your feedback on this idea. Get in contact with us by emailing [email protected]

We found that, now that Kanban is being adopted quickly by a larger audience, the need for pragmatic, “just help us get started” guidance grows. This book is designed to provide a mix of theory, practical examples to help teams and organizations get started with using Kanban principles and practices. It’s an entry point for learning Kanban.

In our work as consultants, we have seen many teams and organizations work in different agile ways. Kanban is one of those. Since the creation of the Kanban Method, there has been a great increase of organizations adopting Kanban practices and various ways to gain knowledge and experience.

kanban a book concept

The Pragmatic Kanban book will have the design of a canvas book. This means it will consist of roughly 50% text and 50% graphics. The layout will be similar to the Operating Canvas Model book. https://www.bol.com/nl/p/operating-model-canvas/9200000075652874/?Referrer=ADVNLGOO002008M-G-119060231707-S-854528380255-9200000075652874&gclid=CjwKCAiAo5qABhBdEiwAOtGmbssvKM9LgPSo-Pfk7T1ZDg4udE-v4-08jfq1An3IlY2TP2zs9Dq5YRoCMyUQAvD_BwE

The content of the book is written in two parts.

Part 1: Kanban for teams

The first part will be made up of a continuing case (part of each chapter) that illustrates how a team that starts to apply Kanban practices grows and collaborates in their implementation. The case is built around theory so that each reader can apply practices based on their own context.

The first chapters will set apart the context for teams that use Kanban as well as the evolution of the method, the connection to Agile and Lean methodologies, and some high-level implementation principles.

In this case, we follow our hero (Mr Kan Ban) through his journey of learning about Kanban and building a Kanban system for his team. He explains the issues his team runs into, learns about the history and practices of Kanban for knowledge work, and tries out different ways to improve value delivery for his team’s customers.

When Mr Kan Bans team starts to deliver value, he will learn about growing his Kanban implementation to deliver more value as an organization, not just the team.

Part 2: Kanban across the organization

In the second part of the book, we take a step back from the team level and will learn more about how to apply Kanban in other contexts. Those contexts will be split up into departments and industries.

Cases will be discussed from departments like HR, Sales, and the PMO. Their specific problems, ways of working, and dynamics will be shown.

The different industries will shed light on specific considerations that are made when the industry is changed. How to deal with tightly regulated organizations? Or work that only brings value when it’s (almost) fully complete, like regulations, policies, and architectural designs.